I Will Make Russia Great Again

Alexei Navalny attends the march in retention of murdered opposition pol Boris Nemtsov in Moscow, February 2017. (c) Ilya Pitalev / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.

In that location has been quite a bit of whiplash in the mode Alexei Navalny, Russia's virtually promising opposition leader, has been regarded. One moment, he's touted every bit Russia'south Vaclav Havel, who is almost to ride in on a white horse and drain the putrid Kremlin swamp. And then the next, we remember Navalny's deep nationalist sympathies and freak out that he'due south actually going to be another Trump or Zeman, an anti-establishment populist who will, inadvertently or not, unleash a wave of xenophobic rage amid his supporters if he comes to power.

We watch his latest expose on Russia's prime minister Dmitry Medvedev — a savvy, beautifully-made flick on the wineries, estates and luxuries that Dimon (the film is titled "Don't call him Dimon", as if to suggest that Putin's one-time placeholder is far too classy to be called past a diminutive, colloquial name) squirreled away under someone else's identities — and nosotros secretly wish The Futurity Belonged to Navalny. And then we hear Navalny make some decidedly illiberal remarks well-nigh Russia's tolerance towards immigrants from Central Asia and migrants from the Caucasus, a region which he has previously insisted that Moscow should "stop feeding".

If we are seriously looking for a viable alternative to Vladimir Putin, this is confusing. Fighting corruption in ane of the nearly decadent countries in the globe is good. But existence all right-wing about it — i.e making anti-minority overtures — is bad, peculiarly given that the Russian Federation is home to 21 indigenous republics and significant numbers of migrant workers from the one-time Soviet periphery. The trouble here is that our attempts to dove-hole Navalny politically are derived from an understanding that Russia is going through the same existential boxing currently playing out in the west, where so often a populist, nationalist authoritarian figure is seen equally defeating the liberal, legal-rational establishment.

This is not case when it comes to the Russian establishment or the Russian opposition. And in the showdown between Navalny and Putin, if one were ever to happen, they would autumn into neither of those roles. We should remember that Navalny emerged on an opposition moving ridge in 2011-2012 that saw Putin as a feudal lord, i who lived higher up the law and owned what he ruled both economically and politically. One of the master complaints against Putin and his cronies that sounded at the Bolotnaya protests back in 2011 was that "you get to live by understandings [ponyatiya], and the residual of united states of america accept to live past the law."

In some means, Putin's dominion is already a kind of primordial Steve Bannon universe: Church building and State are one, Power is mystical, in thrall to money, and flaunts the Police force

The establishment that the Bolotnaya protesters were against, in other words, was illiberal, irrational and not even decadent because tax farming was the bedrock of the organisation itself. In some ways, Putin's dominion was already a kind of primordial Steve Bannon universe — where Church and State were one, where uppity women in coloured tights were imprisoned for dancing in a cathedral, where Power was mystical, merged with money, and flaunted the Law. Past the fourth dimension "late Putinism" set in, there were no functioning institutions to deconstruct even if you wanted to. Putin, much like a populist, rules past appealing directly to people's emotions (if not direct to the commonage subconscious) rather than highly-seasoned to rational self-interest, every bit about democratically-elected leaders seek to do.

But if the new western populists tended to be nationalist, Putin appears to be an exception. Aside from some vague, albeit worrying, rhetorical overtures to nationalism and a dangerously breathless penchant for exploiting, so discarding, nationalist groups, the Kremlin wasn't intrinsically nationalist. Imperialist maybe, simply, given that Putin tends to use the give-and-take "nation" where "empire" applies better, not fully nationalist. With so many internal ethnic republics, and with inter-ethnic riots like the 1 in Moscow's Biryulyovo district in 2013 on the rise, the Kremlin couldn't afford to exist.

This was why the Kremlin cracked down on nationalist groups. And this was why and then many nationalist groups opposed the Kremlin in general and began joining the liberal Bolotnaya protests in particular. Navalny, a lawyer, a representative of the cosmopolitan creative class and generally a liberal, as well had a foot in the nationalist camp. And so, when i of the large Bolotnaya protests featured a cavalcade led by the nationalist DPNI, the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, Navalny, pragmatic plenty to know which mode the wind was blowing, marched proudly alongside its leaders.

A grouping of nationalists during a protestation in Moscow, December 2011. Photo CC-by-NC-ND-2.0: Misha Maslennikov / Flickr. Some rights reserved.This convergence of nationalism, anti-corruption and legalism became especially evident in 2016, when Novorossiya insubordinate commander Igor Strelkov, a former Russian FSB officer, returned from Ukraine and headed upwards an anti-Kremlin nationalist movement. A major betoken in the manifesto of this movement concerned the independence of the courts in particular and dominion of law in general.

This legalism adjacent to the nationalist and fifty-fifty imperialist rhetoric nearly the unification of the "Russian Earth" may sound counterintuitive. Merely it's worth remembering where many of the supporters of the Donbas separatists came from. Some were economically, culturally and personally involved with friends and family members who lived across the border in east Ukraine, but they were also concerned with the effects of growing economic inequality back home. "Tsar, their lives are more important than your wallet," read a placard at a pro-separatist rally in Moscow in 2014. This slogan encapsulated the sentiment of standing upwards for Russian interests at home and abroad and beingness anti-Putin at the same time.

It remains an open question whether Navalny will be allowed by the Kremlin to run for president in 2018

It remains an open question whether Navalny volition exist allowed by the Kremlin to run for president in 2018 — the government have a penchant for shutting down court cases confronting Navalny based on how many people plow out in the street in his back up, and then reigniting them. What is more important in the long run is that Navalny has managed to tap into popular attitudes regarding the way the Kremlin rules Russia — that is, through corruption — and actually starting time changing them.

In this regard, at that place are ii important moments in Navalny's new film. He shows Medvedev saying that corruption "should not only exist illegal, it should be indecent". So, after on, Navalny shows local residents from a nearby village talking about i of Medvedev's undercover dachas and how he sometimes appeared there. "We were waiting for him this year," a man says nonchalantly, equally if this opulence almost his small-scale wooden habitation was the well-nigh normal thing in the world. "Perchance he volition build a road," an elderly woman says, lackadaisically, against the backdrop of her modest, wooden dwelling house. "Let him help out."

A resident of Mansurovo, the location of one of Dmitry Medvedev's land residences. Source: FBK

.Though Navalny didn't spell it out explicitly, these scenes served to amplify Russia's stark economic inequality on the one hand, and the habits of some of the country'south most downtrodden members to normalise that inequality. The moving picture — and the painstaking efforts of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation in general — are non simply about exposing Medvedev's hypocrisy in his anti-abuse drive while president. They are challenging a persistent normalisation of kleptocracy that has become deeply ingrained in Russian political civilisation as an everyday coping mechanism — one that, in turn, colludes with the Kremlin'south exploitation of Russian citizens.

Opinion surveys throughout Putin's rule paint a depressing picture of a majority of Russian citizens who expect that corruption volition increase, in outcome viewing information technology as a "normal" phenomenon. But we should note an important change over the past ten years — a steady increase in the number of citizens actually concerned nigh abuse (from 24% in 2005 to 39% in 2013, co-ordinate to this Levada poll). This trend suggests a growing cerebral dissonance that, at some betoken, has got to requite: you tin can't, after all, continue normalising something you are increasingly condign concerned about as a problem.

But if Russian citizens' awareness of corruption is growing, and then is their distrust of people who migrate. The same poll showed a stark (seven per centum in 2005 to 27% in 2013) increase of people who were near concerned by immigrants and migrants. While these are not, considerately speaking, structurally related concerns, they correlate in the minds of many Russian citizens. For instance, i of the chief concerns amid demonstrators in the violent protests in Biryulyovo in 2013 and on the Moscow Manezh in 2010, which both erupted following the deaths of ethnic Russian citizens, was that the police would not bring the suspected perpetrator to justice because he was a migrant worker from Central Asia — the police force was believed to be too decadent to stand up up to indigenous diaspora groups. This logic is racist, but the experiences (corruption) that inform that racism are existent.

And this flows into another aspect of the appeal of Russian nationalism: the persistent suspicion among patriots that Putin is actually acting in interests other than those that might be understood as ethnically, culturally, and geopolitically "Russian". These suspicions — that Putin was somehow nether the spell of "fifth-columnists" in the government that "needed to be purged" — often manifested themselves in fiery statements fabricated during a 2014 pro-separatist rally in Moscow past imperialist demagogue Alexander Dugin and the United Russia deputy and head of the ultranationalist National Liberation Movement Evgeny Fyodorov.

Navalny'south appeals to deep-seated insecurities nigh immigration reverberate a malaise that can only emerge in a country that has always been an empire, but never a nation

If Navalny is to succeed, he will accept to exploit the divide between the nationalists' mistrust of the Kremlin on the one mitt, and the thought that Russia's rulers are somehow inevitably kleptocratic on the other. Currently, he is successfully straddling this divide. Navalny's Anti-Abuse Foundation (FBK), with its painstaking, legalistic approach to exposing corruption amidst Russian state officials operates under the assumption that in that location is nothing normal about people in power stealing money from the population they are mandated to dominion. Near of all, the FBK team seek to bolster existing institutions and the supremacy of rules by operating according to Russian laws and legal norms, not abstract concepts imported from the w. Navalny's picture, and the millions of Russian citizens who watched it, suggests that that this supposition is infectious.

But this comes with a darker side of the aforementioned coin — Navalny's appeals to deep-seated and growing insecurities about immigration are a reflection of a angst that tin can only sally in a country that has always been an empire, only never a nation. As such, the growing affection for the prospect of a legal-rational, lawful Russia goes hand in manus with the belief that it should exist for "Russians" only. The question that remains is: how far will this nationalism go?

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Source: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/who-ll-make-russia-great-again/

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